The Unstoppable Journey of Breaking Barriers and Building Wealth with Austin Keitner

Transcript

[Mattias]
Welcome to the REI Agent, a holistic approach to life through real estate. I’m Mattias, an agent and investor.

[Erica]
And I’m Erica, a licensed therapist.

[Mattias]
Join us as we interview guests that also strive to live bold and fulfilled lives through business and real estate investing.

[Erica]
Tune in every week for interviews with real estate agents and investors.

[Mattias]
Ready to level up?

[Erica]
Let’s do it.

[Mattias]
Welcome back to the REI Agent. I just interviewed Austin Keitner. Austin is coming out of Toronto, Canada.

We’ve had a couple of people from Toronto on the show. Austin got his start in the sales process doing door-to-door sales. And he applied that principle, the things that he learned there to real estate.

And I think, you know, it’s just interesting how, you know, he could see direct correlations between the number of outputs he did, how much effort he put into getting new deals, into how much volume he actually produced. And I think that’s just something that we sometimes lose sight of in real estate. And I know it’s probably a common thing that’s preached, but if you really think through what you can do to produce the most business possible and start tracking it and doing it and dedicating a certain amount of time, you know, a week to doing those things, you could really make a huge difference in your sales.

So if you are looking to have a goal for how much you wanna sell for the next year, you can systemize how you’re gonna get there. We talked to somebody else that had a goal of wanting to have six listing appointments a week. And so they boiled down exactly what they had to do to get that.

That’s a huge amount of listing appointments every week. So not everybody’s gonna be that big, but maybe two, maybe three. If you had two or three listing appointments a week, your business would probably do pretty well if you landed 50% of those.

That’s maybe a bigger jump than what you’re used to. That would be over 52 listings for a year. So that’s just one example of how you can really just hone in on what works in your business.

It might not be with the same thing that everybody else does. You could make calls to your sphere. You could send postcards to a neighborhood.

You could cold call people. You could door knock a neighborhood. You could combine all those kind of things into one very intense and niched down neighborhood farming to really become the local expert in that neighborhood.

And then it’s gonna be also a matter of consistency. And you’re gonna have to have grit. You’re gonna have to keep doing it because you’re not gonna see success overnight.

Some people get lucky and get a contract or a listing the first door they knock on. I’m sure it’s happened before. But for many people, it’s gonna take a lot of effort and a lot of no’s and figuring out how to do this better.

But if you set yourself up to have a big goal that you wanna achieve and go after that goal and break down how you’re gonna get there and you have these metrics that you track, you’re gonna see that result come to you over time. And without massive action, you’re not gonna get massive results. So just keep that in mind if, not everybody wants that out of life, but if you’re looking to have a big year, if there’s a goal that’s something you wanna achieve, maybe you wanna start investing in real estate and you wanna save for a down payment.

So you need to have sales increase to be able to afford to do so. There are so many different reasons why you’d wanna be successful or have a successful year. But really breaking down those items is gonna be key to getting there.

So Austin is, I thought it was really interesting that he came from a place of doing what a lot of people would not like to do. And that’s kind of where he based his business out of. And that’s door knocking.

And there’s a lot of rejection that happens when you’re cold calling, when you’re just talking to cold people in general, not cold people. It is in Toronto, so maybe they are actually cold. But people that have not been introduced to you, that have not been recommended to you, that you have no personal relationship before with.

So honing the skills of how to have those conversations and how to understand where they’re coming from and be able to express what you want without offending or just honing that skill of having a great attitude is one of the things that he talks about, is important in that aspect of life. But you might have found a vein that you can tap into that does not require cold interactions with people that you don’t know. It might, you might have a totally different strategy, but find that metric, find that thing that you can do on a daily basis to get you to the numbers that you need.

So start thinking through that in your business. If you are in a place where things have died down a little bit with interest rate hikes, you might need to be more intentional to find that business where before, it was just kind of knocking on your door instead of you having to go knock on their door. Anyway, without further ado, this is a great conversation with Austin Keitner.

Welcome back to the REI Agent. I am here with Austin Keitner. Austin, thank you so much for joining us from always sunny Toronto.

[Austin Keitner]
Always, but not always. Thanks for having me. That’s what they say about it, right?

Something like that. More like snowy right now.

[Mattias]
Yeah, hey, we’re about to get possibly doused with a big snow storm starting tomorrow. So we’ll see what happens there. Right on.

Everyone’s getting it.

[Austin Keitner]
Even North Florida got it this year.

[Mattias]
That’s crazy. What a winner. But Austin, you are a realtor in Toronto.

Tell us a little bit about how you got into real estate to start.

[Austin Keitner]
I was doing direct sales. I was selling stuff door to door. And I was doing good.

And I was learning from somebody who was teaching me how to actually sell. I hadn’t had that education before. So I was learning how to do direct sales, how to get people in a split second when you’re at their door to open up to you and to, if you do your job right, let you in the house and sell them something.

So I was learning how to do that. And I was starting to make good money with that education and that practice. And the guy who was mentoring me, it turned out made most of his money from investing in real estate.

He was making money in his sales, but he was using that money to invest in real estate. And that’s where he was building his wealth. So I realized that I should probably do that too.

I was learning how to make money from him. So I should learn how to build wealth as well. But I didn’t think I could learn it unless I really immersed myself in it.

And I figured if I could make money selling water heaters door to door, I could probably make more selling houses, just a larger ticket item. And while I was doing that, I could learn about real estate and learn about hopefully how to invest in it as well. So that’s how it started.

[Mattias]
So was that like some Zig Ziglar in there? So any of that kind of a sales coaching?

[Austin Keitner]
It was more, I mean, he probably was influenced by Zig. He was doing direct sales in the seventies selling pots and pans business to business. So he got his training doing that.

So I’m sure that was Zig Ziglar time, but yeah, of course about attitude, mindset. Attitude was the main thing. It was attitude plus results or attitude plus effort equals results.

So the harder you work, the more energy you put into the sale to the conversation that you’re having and the better attitude you have during that process, the better results you’re gonna get.

[Mattias]
Yeah, that’s true. Yeah, Zig is a, it’s a fun guy to listen to still. He’s motivating, you know, the prospect of door-to-door sales, like the pots or whatever, like you’re talking about, that’s daunting.

That’s a good, that’s really learning the craft, I guess. And I don’t know, cutting the teeth, doing it that way. Did you, have you been able to apply a lot of those principles from, I mean, do you door knock or anything like that to have that experience there and apply it to real estate?

[Austin Keitner]
So that’s how I built my business. So I did the direct sales with that company for just over two years. And that was eight to 12 hours a day, six days a week, 50 weeks a year for two years.

I trained probably a thousand agents, sales reps to do the job. Most of them did last more than a day, but some of them stuck around. So I had built a team of direct sales agents in that company.

So I wanted to bring that to real estate because I figured if I could sell water heaters, I could sell houses with the same attitude, with the same effort, with the same process. So I just started knocking in my community as soon as I got my real estate license. That was my number one lead source.

That’s how I did all of my business. In my first three months, I didn’t do any transactions, but in my fourth month, I did 10 transactions. And they were either from door knocking directly, or one of them was a referral from another agent because she saw that I was hustling so hard and she came across first time buyers at an open house and she thought I should work with them.

So we got a deal done with them pretty quickly. And then I think one or two of them were from my listings because we sold them directly to a buyer. So I did 10 transactions in that first month of doing any transactions.

And I give 100% of the credit to the door knocking efforts.

[Mattias]
Okay, all right, hold on. This is, I hope this doesn’t cut you off guard here, but I’m trying to think through, like pretend you’re knocking on my door. And I come and answer, what do you say to me?

How do you break the ice? How do you like, you know, not be apologetic that you’re bothering them or whatever? I mean, like, how do you do that?

No, I appreciate that.

[Austin Keitner]
When I first started, I didn’t have any sales, I didn’t have any listings, I didn’t have any credibility to go with, but I had my attitude and I had the effort. So I just went to the first door that I could reach with my fists. And I asked, I said, hey, I’m just coming by really quickly.

The market’s doing really well. I’m just curious if you guys have thought about selling your house at all. Okay.

I just kept it super simple. And a lot of people would have said no.

[Mattias]
No.

[Austin Keitner]
Yeah, and when they have a good attitude and like, you know, they’re not usually slamming the door on your face. But yeah, I mean, a lot of people probably said no. And I didn’t care about that.

I was just looking, I knew that I wanted to add six people to my database every day. So I would door knock until I got at least that. And along the way I was getting appointments and I was getting leads.

So every day I was adding leads to my database. I would get appointments here and there. I would add them to a database to make sure that I at least could set up a follow-up task.

Cause unlike my direct sales job before, whereas if you didn’t sell them at the moment that you met with them, you probably were never gonna sell them that water heater. Where it is this business, it’s much more about the follow-up process. So I wanted to make sure that I had them in a database that I could at the very least set up a task to follow up with them.

And then I was setting up some appointments along the way. People were canceling along the way. I would just get more appointments.

I would start getting some listings after a month or two. I have to admit Mattias, I was getting a little bit frustrated by the end of the second month. Hadn’t done any trades actions yet.

I was expecting to come in like right away doing deals just cause I had that experience with the direct sales. But it’s a bit of a longer sale process. Everyone was telling me it’s a three month sale process.

And it was pretty much exactly right. It’s the fruits of the labor started to come about in that fourth month. And then until you have leverage, it’s a bit of a cycle.

So doing those transactions took me away from doing more lead generation and follow-up calls because I was servicing the transactions and doing all the administrative work. So then it became a process of replacing myself in the areas that are the lowest dollar per hour activities. So I knew right away that I had to leverage myself with the administrative tasks, doing the paperwork, sending the right information to the right person at the right time, setting up some of the marketing stuff for the listings.

I knew I needed administrative support to do a lot of the stuff that was taking a lot of my time. So that was my first hire. I hired them after those 10 transactions just to help clean up some of the chaos I was creating.

[Mattias]
That’s incredible. So that person was like filling out listing agreements, writing offers, that kind of stuff?

[Austin Keitner]
Yeah, at the time I didn’t have that skillset. I didn’t have the skills of delegation and leverage. I didn’t know exactly how to train somebody to do what I was doing.

And I didn’t know how to hire the right people. So I had some trial and error, with different hires, which is just an inevitable part of the process. I don’t think anybody is gonna…

I mean, I shouldn’t say that because I know some people who got either lucky or just maybe had some training before or whatever happened, they got a really good person right off the bat. And that person either figured it out and self-trained or they were trained properly by their leader. But I wasn’t that person.

I wasn’t particularly good at the hiring process and the delegating process. I had to learn those skills. So after a few bad hires and after a few times of me not doing the job properly of training them and developing them, we slowly and gradually started getting the right people, building the right systems.

And now it feels like there’s always ways to improve, but it certainly feels like a well-oiled machine. I have a lot of confidence at this stage of our business to bring on a new client, make sure that the 180 different things that have to happen for the transaction to get executed properly are gonna happen properly. There’s accountability, there’s checklists, the right tasks are assigned to the right people in the right roles.

But that took some time.

[Mattias]
Yeah. No, I mean, it’s definitely something that doesn’t come naturally to everybody. But the crazy thing to me is that you took that on that after three months, you’re like, boom, I need somebody.

And I think that is a place that many people get stuck for a long time trying to do everything themselves. And I just need to work harder, I just need to be more efficient, I need to, whatever. I’m not good at paperwork, so I just need to get better at paperwork.

I just need to be more detail-oriented or whatever. So it’s kudos to you for doing that so fast.

[Austin Keitner]
Yeah, I appreciate that. We have to care about our dollar per hour, how much we’re making per hour. So a great first step, and this is something I did early on, is I just made a list of all the things that I had to do.

And I assigned a dollar per hour value. So I knew that some of these things were like, you can hire a virtual assistant. That’s what I started to do.

After a couple in-person hires, I hired a virtual assistant who had some training with the company, and I could hire them for four hours a day. And that’s 20 hours a week, and it literally costs four or five dollars per hour. So it was super inexpensive.

They had some training, and I could give them some of the things that I knew were only worth four or five dollars an hour to do. And so yeah, it was things like the paperwork, it was things like even booking showings, coordinating the timing of those. There’s a bit of upfront training for some of those things, but the amount of time that you invest, I started looking at it as investment of time.

So I’d invest the money, the time up front, and then it would pay dividends. Every time that task came up, I was getting paid a dividend of time back for that task. I didn’t have to do it anymore.

[Mattias]
Yeah, totally, no. I’ve definitely experienced that as well, and how it kind of, yeah, it can be a lot more. I think that some of the people don’t want to be a manager, and so they just wanna be a solo agent.

And you do have to manage, you do have to train, and that is all part of bringing people on. But I think, to your point, I think it becomes kind of addicting to be like, okay, how do I make this process more systemized to have somebody else work through that and do it for you, and for cheaper? Because yeah, you’re gonna spend your time where you’re moving the needle forward more efficiently.

[Austin Keitner]
I think another reason agents don’t delegate some of these activities is, yes, you have to train somebody, and it’s faster to do it yourself up front, for sure. There’s no question about that. But the other thing is, then they get that extra time back, and they have to do more lead generation.

You have to do the things that pay you the highest dollar per hour, and a lot of agents are trying to avoid doing those things. And even if they do it early on, and I’ve been guilty of this in different parts of my career, I feel like I’ve earned the right to not have to do it sometimes. But when you’re replacing your time with staff, with leverage, and you’re using it for luxury, then you’re not really leveraging that time.

So if you’re hiring somebody to replace tasks that are lower dollar per hour, and you’re replacing it with those higher dollar per hour activities, like lead generation, follow-up, going on more appointments, then it gets you a really, really high return. But agents don’t want to have to do more of those things that they are trying to get away from, which is what got them the right to earn replacing themselves in the first place.

[Mattias]
Well, I think it’s also a bit of a puzzle. If you look at what your strength is in the real estate game, you might find that you are better suited in one area, and that’s where you get the most energy, where you get the most return. And that’s gonna be finding the other people that are energized and excited about the things that you hate.

That’s another aspect of it as well. I think that could be important to consider, and the benefits of getting a team involved or having delegation in general. That’s right.

[Austin Keitner]
The people that we hire to do the tasks that are time-consuming and low dollar per hour activities, they’re usually way better at those activities than we are. If we built our business to a point where we’ve earned the right for some leverage, then we’re probably not great at doing those administrative things and those detail-oriented thing and following up with the customer when there’s an issue missing on a certain document or making sure that the compliance paperwork is taken care of. Just those things that are detail-oriented are not usually the same skillset as the things that drive us and drive the business forward and get us in front of people and get us closing deals.

So we can actually provide a much more valuable service to our clients because somebody who’s really good at those things that we’re not so good at is managing that part of the business so it creates a better customer experience.

[Mattias]
And that kind of leads into another reason why some people do not want to hire us because they feel like they can do it better and that they don’t think they can trust somebody else to do it as well as them. They’ve maybe built it more than three months. They have built their business over the course of years and have a lot of pride and then they just feel like they can’t delegate because people won’t do it right.

And I think that’s ultimately the goal is what you said is that you really wanna have a system where you’re providing your clients a better overall experience because you have people that are really good at all the different elements in it.

[Austin Keitner]
Yeah, and if they are very good at the administrative work, they’re probably not crushing it on the sales. Like it’s usually a different skillset. So their best option might be a partnership with an agent who is really good at those skillsets and doesn’t wanna have to do the administrative stuff as much.

Like there could be ways to, I find that in partnerships, in whether it’s delegating through hiring or whether it’s through partnerships of agents and teams. I partnered with a company called Place and they give us so many resources. They give us accounting resources, legal resources, onboarding of agents resources, recruiting resources, auto plan resources, marketing resources.

Like you can do so much more in combination. It’s like the cells in our body are better off by cooperating with the other cells in our body to give us a better organism. We’re better as organisms by combining our efforts with other organisms to get much better results than we ever could on our own.

So this theory of evolution, the strongest survive is I think outdated now. They’re realizing that the cooperation of organisms, the cooperation of humans is actually what’s gonna get people to the next level and to accomplish much more than the individual could on their own.

[Mattias]
Yeah, I love it. And I think in addition to all that, I just wanna also say that I think there’s often times where people will feel like they need to read a new book, a new self-help book or get more disciplined on something when in reality, they’re just focusing on things that they’re not, that’s not their strength. They should lean into their strengths and flip the switch.

Don’t focus on where you’re lacking, hire that out. Instead, focus on what you’re good at. And then you’ll feel like, it just makes it easier.

I think it’s a mindset shift that people have to go through. Yeah, it’s so true. So okay, so fast forward, you can tell me the steps if you want to, but you are now running a team.

So you have other agents involved as well, not just admin, right? Correct, yeah.

[Austin Keitner]
There’s seven of us right now. And I was telling you before this, last year I got a bit distracted with another project that I was working on. So I wasn’t as focused on growth.

I just wanted to make sure that I was providing the service and the coaching and the resources to the team members that we already had. But we are definitely looking for more growth this year. We have awesome systems for agents to plug into.

We want to partner with agents who are hungry and they want to make a difference and they want to have domination in the communities that they serve. And we built our business from, it was door knocking, but then we layered on, we started doing open houses in the same community. So your signs are all over the place.

Augmenting our social media in the community and following local businesses and creating handles in our social media that are related to the community that we’re serving. And then showing off the real estate in those communities. So everything focusing on a certain area, like most sellers are choosing to work with agents that know the community, that have a presence, that you have mindshare with the customer base.

So honing in all the efforts. So just going back a few steps, I started off door knocking those communities. We started doing a bunch of transactions there, but then I hired inside sales agents too.

So we started calling, instead of just door knocking, we were also calling, but you can call a single community. There’s 250 communities in our real estate board in the greater Toronto area. And you can call through an entire community in a single day with an inside sales agent who’s doing that full time.

So I was doing listing employments and buyers all the way from Northeast greater Toronto area to Southeast greater Toronto area. And there’s 6 million people in the greater Toronto area. So it’s a massive amount of geography, dense geography.

So we were spread thin and we weren’t growing. So the first year did 350,000 gross commission, the next year did 650, but then we were stuck at that amount for like three years in a row. And we realized that 50% of our transactions were still happening from that original area that I had door knocked.

So we decided at that point just to go all in on those communities only. So that’s when we started focusing. Anytime we’re door knocking, we’re door knocking those communities.

Anytime we’re open housing, we’re open housing those communities. Anytime we’re giving back to any community centers, we’re giving back to community centers in those communities. Like I said, social media, everything just started honing in on those communities.

So we started building systems around that and our marketing around that and our database is built around that. So agents plugging in, if they wanna have ownership of a community or something like that, we just have some great resources. We have some great tools.

We have great human resources that can help an agent who wants to create that presence for themselves in that community. So that’s what we’re focused on this year is growing our teams at that department by growing agents and growing their presence in their communities.

[Mattias]
That makes a ton of sense. I mean, it’s farming, it’s niching down, it’s being that local expert and how, yeah, the riches are in the niches, right? I mean, that’s awesome.

I love it. Let’s talk a little bit about that investment, if you don’t mind. I think this podcast is all about helping realtors get into investments, et cetera.

So, and I think just to talk a little bit about this, I don’t know if this happened to you with this particular investment, but I think sometimes it’s easy to get distracted, especially if the market isn’t what it was. Like if the market shifts a little bit, I think it’s easy to get distracted and look for other things to occupy yourself. And I think that’s just something that people should be cognizant of.

I saw, I was serving on a real estate board and saw a ton of transfers, way more transfers than normal, people going to different brokerages, et cetera. And I think it’s just this restlessness that was happening. And different in Canada, we had a lawsuit happening in the United States.

So, I mean, I think there’s a lot of restlessness happening. I would imagine your market wasn’t the same as it was in COVID, in like 2021. I’m imagining it slowed down a little bit.

Is that true? Yeah, big time, yeah. I mean, interest rates had a massive impact on us as well.

Sure, so yeah, I mean, I just think it’s interesting that I’m definitely not always 100% focused and I can see this being like up and down in my sales every year, my accountant laughs. This is supposed to be a good year for me in sales. So let’s see if it happens.

[Austin Keitner]
Yeah, no, I was realizing with the recession that I was kind of scared that all of my income was coming from my sales and the business that’s attached to those sales. So I wanted to create income in another way and it ended up escalating. It was supposed to just be something simple and it was around like saunas and cold plunges and owning a private property and people being able to book and having that experience in nature.

And you’re on private property, but you just feel like you’re kind of in the middle of nowhere. So that was the concept, but we realized that through more research that we needed our own property. And it turns out the only properties that were conducive to that were like 3.5 million or 4 million. So I sold some of my assets and found the right one and we bought it. And it turned out though that we should have probably never been the ones to operate on the property. And after a year and a half long renovation and after some lawsuit and after a bunch of bullshit with the town and just a lot of really valuable learning experiences, realized that the real estate asset, still very valuable.

And it turns out the zoning for it allows for the highest and best uses for treatment centers for people who are suffering mental health and drug addiction and alcohol addiction. So our efforts have been to find a tenant who’s in that space. And it turns out that for real estate investment, it’s a ideal property for it and the ideal tenant just for the long-term aspect of it.

I had residential investments and there’s in Canada, especially there’s just a lot, the laws are favored heavily towards tenants and it can create a lot of financial instability, but with commercial tenant, there’s a lot more stability and it’s more long-term. And in this case, it’s just, it feels good on a soul level because everybody I’ve talked to about that industry and that business knows somebody who’s been through it and has come up in a lot of cases, come out the other side with the right help and stuff. So it feels good being part of a solution to the mental health crisis that we’re going through.

And it’s from a real estate investment, it’s just a good cash flowing asset. So I don’t know if I’ll do more of those, but it’s the path, I didn’t plan for the path to be the way it was. We were planning to be operators, but thankfully it worked out that we can just hold the real estate asset and let other people.

And then, and now stay in our lane of owning real estate, managing the real estate assets, selling real estate so that we can take money off the table. Like our real estate business, our real estate sales should be built in a way that we can take money off the table. Like we don’t wanna have, we don’t wanna just keep reinvesting into our real estate business because then if our real estate business is worth nothing at some point, because there’s a deep recession and maybe we’ve just decided like after 30 years, we don’t wanna do this anymore, our business would be worth potentially nothing.

But if we’re taking money off the table every year and we’re putting it into real estate assets, we’re putting it into other businesses, we’re putting it into retirement accounts, we’re putting it into reserves, that’s the path to building wealth. That’s the path to financial freedom so that we can work because we want to, when we want to, with who we want to.

[Mattias]
Yeah, that’s definitely the goal. And I think you just, your goals can be different. I mean, you can still be an active salesperson.

I know people that are in the office, show up to the office every day because they have to. They’re old and maybe not even healthy, but they just show up to the office because they need to keep working, they need to keep lights on, that kind of stuff. But there’s also people that just, they wouldn’t know what to do with themselves.

This is their personality, this is who they are. They are great connectors in the community and they just love it and that’s great. And I think that the difference is, or one of the goals should be is to have that be an option as soon as possible.

Like, you can invest in real estate and cover your baseline stuff and then you’re not gonna feel as worried when there are slower times, if the market shifts, that kind of stuff. You can kind of balance things out a little bit with your investment portfolio. So yeah, remembering to actually invest when times are good is definitely a skill to have.

[Austin Keitner]
Yeah, a mentor of mine, he taught me the concept of flipping the triangle. So the base of the triangle is your income and then in the middle is the cashflow from that income, the excess, like your income minus your expenses, so whatever’s left, being put into assets at the top of the triangle. But our goal is to flip the triangle where the base of the triangle is our assets which are paying our income so that we can live the life that we want.

So what we need to be doing is, what he taught us to do is to create buckets of wealth. So in our accounts, like I create physical accounts because there’s a book called Profit First, I don’t know if you’ve heard of it.

[Mattias]
Yeah, I’ve heard of it, yeah.

[Austin Keitner]
So good, so he talks about bank account accounting. So we look at our bank account and we think that we’re rich, we think we’ve got all this money, but we haven’t split any of it off into our expense account, we haven’t split off our tax account, we haven’t split off into our investing accounts for real estate specifically, for business specifically, for our retirement accounts. So we have to physically take money off the table.

So I physically created these new accounts. Some of them are in different banks so that I never even see them. And we create these different accounts so that we can segment those dollars into that.

And then what’s left is just what we have to work with. So that’s like our operating account. And then we can realistically work within a budget and just spend what we need to.

And we can get creative. It doesn’t mean we have to run a shitty business. In fact, we could still run an amazing business, but with our cost and our available cash in mind and be taking money off the table so that we have the cash to invest in these other assets so that we can earn income from those assets which eventually pay us our income over time.

[Mattias]
Yeah, I love it. And like I mentioned to you a little bit earlier before we got on the call, but I think that syndications are just one of the ways that agents can really maximize investing, putting things in those buckets without having to actually master a new skill. So some people that have never even done residential rentals, that’s a whole new thing to get into.

I mean, you have to think about the tendency, to think about the, even just having property management, you’re still gonna have to kind of write checks sometimes to cover things and fix leaky toilets, all that kind of stuff that maybe prevents people from getting into those kinds of investments. Syndications can really put, you’re just putting money in it and you’re setting it and forgetting it. You have to learn the art of navigating to make sure you’re making a wise investment, that you’re going with a good operator that is investing in an asset class that you like.

But you can also be at different asset classes. Like I just interviewed a guy that does mobile home parks and parking garages. I saw that.

Yeah, it was great. And then there was, you know, there’s all sorts of different things. There’s like apartments, of course, there’s mineral rights, there’s all sorts of different things you can get involved with.

And again, it’s about setting it, forgetting it, and focusing on what you do well so that you don’t have to, you know, be cutting grass at an apartment complex and dealing with all the headaches of the tenants there. So it’s something for, you know, it’s different for everybody. Some people want to be more hands-on and there’s nothing wrong with that.

[Austin Keitner]
Yeah, I think people underestimate the value of compounding, compound interest. So even if like an index fund, you can buy an index fund right now at a low to no fee dollar amount, if you put $3,500 into that for the next 30 years, the value of that index fund is gonna be $7.9 million.

[Mattias]
Yeah.

[Austin Keitner]
From 3,500, every real estate agent who is even somewhat productive, if they’re paying attention to their expenses and putting in a minimal viable effort into their lead generation, they should be able to put aside $3,500 a month. And that, for most people, would be more than enough money to retire on a loan. So if they do nothing else, but they just invest in an index fund, which they don’t have to pay any attention to, the market takes care of that because an index fund will kick out the worst companies and just bring in the best companies for that year.

And on average, for the last 30 years, they get a 10% return. So you don’t have to be a genius. You don’t have to, I mean, you guys are, I love that you’re exploring different asset classes because as you do invest in these basic retirement accounts, like these index funds could just be from a retirement account, like a 401k in the States, RRSP in Canada.

[Mattias]
Yeah.

[Austin Keitner]
But then excess money, then that’s what can motivate us to make more money too. Because when we see the growth, when we see that there’s these opportunities to have our money grow and to work for us, and when we start to understand compound interest or look at the numbers over time, it can be extremely motivating and that can get our sales up a lot too. And then we start to think about like, okay, like I need to make more money because there could be emergencies.

There could be opportunities that I’m missing. Like we come up with these reasons to do that. And in some cases to make more money, I need to leverage some of the things that are taking my time that are making me very little to no money.

And then it starts getting exciting to get that person. Instead of that person being like this obstacle, there’s pain in the ass that I have to deal with. I could just do it myself.

It becomes this motivating factor. Like, okay, this is buying my time, which is going to get me more dollars per hour, which is going to get me more financial freedom because I’m gonna be buying more asset classes.

[Mattias]
And that compounds then as well, right? Your time compounds. It’s awesome.

It’s a great metaphor. Yeah, no, it is fun. I think just having a little bit of intentionality being to operating your business and not, you know, money, your personal life, all that stuff just goes so far.

Just sitting down and thinking and planning. And that’s not something that always comes naturally to me. But I think, you know, having something that you’re working towards and having intentional steps towards that goal is just, you’ll be amazed how much different your life can be instead of just life happening to you.

[Austin Keitner]
I agree so much. And like having mentorship is so important. Having coaching, having the right people who are guiding you.

Because none of us know how to do this. None of us are thinking about this on the regular. We weren’t taught it in school.

Most of our parents weren’t teaching us this shit. So, I mean, what you’re doing, interviewing so many smart people and like, I know that we talked about this before. You’re learning so much from them.

Yeah, really. And people who are listening to your podcast are obviously your listeners are on that trajectory. They’re learning from other people, which is what we all need to do.

[Mattias]
It’s a great, the world is so full of information and the internet really just opened it up to everybody. It’s so cool. And now I will see how the new internet with AI, how that changes things.

Because it’s a powerful tool as well. That’s crazy. But yeah, so when you, do you have a fundamental book that you think that everybody should read or one that you think that you’re just currently enjoying right now in your phase of life?

[Austin Keitner]
Yeah, I think the one thing is super fundamental and foundational. Any, I mean, any book that nails and does a lot of research on time management and maximizing your time and maximizing. I mean, that book’s so great because it talks about like the top 20% of the things that gets you 80% of your results, but then breaks it down to the top 20% of that 20%.

So it’s like, what do I need to do in this moment right now so that I can get the best result possible? Because there’s a million things we could do and there’s a million things we should do, but there’s probably one or two things that is gonna move the needle forward the most. So that book does an amazing job of getting that done.

And currently I’m reading or listening to Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell. And that puts a bit of a different spin on how we leverage our time and how we replace ourselves in different areas of our business. So I’m enjoying that.

And I’m talking to Dan a little bit right now about coaching as well.

[Mattias]
That’s awesome. Yeah, those are great. Great resources.

And I mean, I think it’s so cool. The one thing is so simple as well. Like you can, it has more depth to it, but if you just boil it down, what’s the one thing I can do?

It is a really simple concept. And for me, like, I can’t say I’m 100% perfect on this, but I know that if I get my wife coffee in the morning, like that’s the one thing I can do to really set myself up for success with her for that day.

[Austin Keitner]
That’s super smart. And that’s showing you care. So that’s a pro move right there.

[Mattias]
Yeah, yeah. No, I love it. So Austin, if anybody wanted to follow you or has any questions for you, what’s the best way to, where are you?

Are you on Instagram?

[Austin Keitner]
Yeah, Instagram. We’re starting to do more YouTube stuff. I just did, right before the Christmas break, I did a 100 contact day.

So I hadn’t done 100 contacts in a single day since my first year in real estate. So I documented, I filmed it. I’ve got live conversations with people.

People saying no and how I handled that. People saying yes and leading to an appointment. I booked an appointment with somebody who had a listing.

He’s an agent. So he had his own house listed and I booked an appointment. Now we’ve signed that listing.

So I’ve got that conversation documented. So YouTube or Instagram, @AustinKeitner for both, if anyone wants to check those out.

[Mattias]
Okay, awesome. Yeah, well, awesome. Thanks so much for being on the show.

It’s been a great conversation. Yeah, man, thanks for having me.

[Austin Keitner]
Look forward to talking more.

[Erica]
Thanks for listening to the REI Agent.

[Mattias]
If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe to catch new shows every week.

[Erica]
Visit REIAgent.com for more content.

[Mattias]
Until next time, keep building the life you want.

[Erica]
All content in the show is not investment advice or mental health therapy. It is intended for entertainment purposes only.